第70章

It is of no avail to preach temperance and teetotalism to these people.The drink habit may be the cause of many miseries; but it is, in turn, the effect of other and prior miseries.The temperance advocates may preach their hearts out over the evils of drink, but until the evils that cause people to drink are abolished, drink and its evils will remain.

Until the people who try to help, realize this, their well-intentioned efforts will be futile, and they will present a spectacle fit only to set Olympus laughing.I have gone through an exhibition of Japanese art, got up for the poor of Whitechapel with the idea of elevating them, of begetting in them yearnings for the Beautiful and True and Good.Granting (what is not so) that the poor folk are thus taught to know and yearn after the Beautiful and True and Good, the foul facts of their existence and the social law that dooms one in three to a public-charity death, demonstrates that this knowledge and yearning will be only so much of an added curse to them.

They will have so much more to forget than if they had never known and yearned.Did Destiny to-day bind me down to the life of an East End slave for the rest of my years, and did Destiny grant me but one wish, I should ask that I might forget all about the Beautiful and True and Good; that I might forget all I had learned from the open books, and forget the people I had known, the things I had heard, and the lands I had seen.And if Destiny didn't grant it, I am pretty confident that I should get drunk and forget it as of as possible.

These people who try to help! Their college settlements, missions, charities, and what not, are failures.In the nature of things they cannot but be failures.They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived.

They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk.They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End as teachers and savants.They do not understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of social redeemers.They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively collected, they have achieved nothing.

As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off their backs.The very money they dribble out in their child's schemes has been wrung from the poor.They come from a race of successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they try to tell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him.Of what use, in the name of God, is it to establish nurseries for women workers, in which, for instance, a child is taken while the mother makes violets in Islington at three farthings a gross, when more children and violet-makers than they can cope with are being born right along? This violet-maker handles each flower four times, 576 handlings for three farthings, and in the day she handles the flowers 6912 times for a wage of eighteen cents.She is being robbed.Somebody is on her back, and a yearning for the Beautiful and True and Good will not lighten her burden.

They do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not do for the mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they have done for the child in the day.